Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger Network and meme mastermind, has offered to buy link-sharing site Reddit for an undisclosed sum.

After approaching a few Reddit staffers privately about his desire to acquire the struggling site, he made the offer publicly via The Daily What and then tweeted his intentions for all the world to read.

Reddit is currently owned by Condé Nast, publishers of print publications from tech-focused Wired to fashion rag Vogue. The sitewent freemium just last month after its staffers found themselves in financially dire straits — an odd circumstance given the stature of the parent company. At that time, Reddit’s admins had been given a fixed budget for the site, and their Condé Nast-imposed bottom line was not being met. After around 6,000 Reddit members donated, the site was deemed “saved.”

It’s that sense of community that’s inspired Huh to make a bid for the site. “I’ve tried before,” he wrote to us in a private Twitter exchange, “and been told a flat out ‘not for sale,’ hence the public version.”

In Huh’s public offer, he wrote:

I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky, troublesome users that we love so much.

Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.

Reddit’s traffic profile and meme-surfacing abilities fit beautifully with the Cheezburger family, we have to admit. And if anyone knows about printing paper, financially speaking, based on memes and critical masses of web traffic, it’s Huh.

But after being turned down in the past, do you think Huh will make an impression on Condé Nast with his tweeted offer? Let us know what you think in the comments.

That’s the question we posed in this week’s Web Faceoff, our ongoing series comparing technology apps or ideas. We asked you which location-based service you preferred: Facebook Places or Foursquare?

This week’s winner: Foursquare! The contest wasn’t even close; with 57.11% of the vote (1,611 votes), Foursquare remained the king of geolocation. Facebook Places was able to muster 18.86% of the popular vote. Of our voting readers, 7.73% (218 votes) said it was a tie between the two, while 16.31% of you (460 votes) said that you preferred another location-based service.

Many of you pointed out that Facebook Places and Foursquare are likely to be used by different types of people for different purposes. “Facebook is going for the people who want to connect every part of their Facebook experience to a location, while Foursquare is going for a games-based market,” said commenter Anuj Ahooja. Others pointed out that while they preferred Foursquare, Facebook’s userbase of 500 million (and counting) will make tough competition for any startup.

What do you think this week’s poll results? How will the competition between the two companies play out? Let us know in the comments.

Just when I was about to give up hope of ever becoming mayor of Mashable HQ on Foursquare, the location-sharing social network has launched a new feature that might help alleviate my checkin fatigue: “am I mayor yet?”

According to the new feature, which launched this afternoon, I’m just four days away from becoming mayor of our New York City office. I know that because the service now tells you within the mobile app after each checkin (and with Mashable’s Brett Petersel on vacation, my dream might just come true).

In a blog post, Foursquare reminds us how mayorships work, writing that “you need to have checked in more days than anyone else over the last two months (60 days), so only one check-in per day counts.” Earlier this year, the service also introduced some new features to prevent so-called “gaming” of the mayorship system, an increasingly important issue as more brands begin to offer real world rewards for checkins.

Third-party developers had already built a number of apps – like “When Will I Be Mayor” – that do essentially the same thing that Foursquare has just integrated into its service. For those that care about the mayorship aspect of the game, bringing the functionality in-house should go a long way in keeping users engaged.

During the height of the crisis, four NYU students decided to create an open source alternative to Facebook. Their goal was to raise $10,000 for their summer project, but dramatic interest helped them raise over $100,000 through donations. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the project.

Since then, the Diaspora team has been mostly silent, coding away on their project. However, in a blog postearlier today, they revealed that the project is on track for release on September 15.

“We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open sourced on September 15th,” the Diaspora team said in its announcement.

Only the Beginning

Diaspora was originally intended to be just a summer project, but the high interest in the project has changed the team’s plans. Diaspora’s development schedule has been extended.

“We aren’t going to stop working after we release,” Diaspora stated in its blog post. “Ilya and Raphael are taking leave from NYU, and we will continue to develop and maintain Diaspora as a long term project.”

What will Diaspora look like? According to the team, it’s focusing on “on building clear, contextual sharing.” One of the open source social network’s features will be making it easy and intuitive for users to decide what content gets added and shared to their social circles.

We’re looking forward to seeing the final product and trying it ourselves. What do you think of the Diaspora project?

Twitter is an ever-expanding source of fascinating information. More than just news and updates, there is also another, more fun side of Twitter that is sometimes overlooked.

You can use the real-time micro-blogging service to get a daily dose of education, entertainment, or something in between. Whether you want to expand your vocab, discover new music, be inspired, or just view a cute bunny on a daily basis, Twittercan help.

Read on for our suggestions of 20 fun accounts to check out (dependent on your personal taste, of course) and let us know of any other recommendations you have in the comments box below.

This is a cool Twitter account to follow as it will help you discover new indie music. It offers a new song every day; more than enough to stop your music collection going stale. If your tastes don’t lean to the Indie scene then NewSongoftheDay offers a more mainstream alternative.

This account is great for any aspiring shutterbugs as it sets “daily shooting assignments” to inspire and motivate people to get out and shoot — and then share their results. If you’re more interested in viewing the results than doing the snapping, also consider the Daily Photo account.

Sure, you could serve your guests that Grey Goose you’ve been hoarding in the freezer -straight up, in a glass – but where’s the fun in that? Learn a new mixed drink recipe each day by following this Twitter account.

We’ve saved a fun one for last. This account literally offers up one “cool thing” on a daily basis; ranging from photography, video, art, history, gaming, toys, geekery, etc. Anything goes — as long as it’s cool!

As you may already be aware, Lady Gaga is Twitter’s most-followed user with more than 5.74 million followers. But who is Twitter’s most-listed user?

When Twitter Lists launched last year, there was a frenzy of interest and activity surrounding curated Lists and, of course, the number of Lists each user was on. We vividly remember the heated competition to be included on popular Lists.

Now that 10 months have passed since the introduction of Lists, who reigns supreme as Twitter’s most-listed user? Is it Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most-followed user? Or how about Britney Spears, who previously held the crown? Or perhaps it’s Ashton Kutcher, the “king of Twitter,” according toOprah?

While Gaga (#2), Spears (#7) and Kutcher (#9) are all in the top 10 of Twitter’s most-listed users chart, the undisputed champion is actually teenage hearthrob Justin Bieber. According to Fan Page List, Bieber is on more than 264,000 lists, more than double Lady Gaga’s 106,000+. President Obama is third, while celebrities Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez and Ellen DeGeneres also appear in the top 10. The only brand to make the list is CNN Breaking News, with 61,000+ listings.

If recent patents are any indication, your future iMac might just include a built-in iPad.

The website Patently Apple has uncovered some European patent filings filed in September 2009 and first published in January 2010. The document outlines a system for an iMac touch, a device that acts like a standard desktop computer in one orientation and a tablet in another.

The idea is that when the device is in the upright position, like a standard iMac or flatscreen monitor, it can be controlled using a mouse and keyboard. When reclined, an accelerometer will trigger advanced multi-touch mode and switch the operating system from Mac OS X to iOS.

In addition to seamlessly switching modes/operating systems, the patent information also details a system that would allow peripheral control of an iPhone or iPad from the iMac touch.

The idea of the two operating systems co-existing and switching seamlessly based on orientation is awesome for a desktop and even more killer for a netbook. I love both my MacBook Pro and my iPad, but if I could combine them into one super device, that would be the best of all worlds.

Some of the information in these patents go back to 2007, so it is clear Apple has been hard at work perfecting touch for the desktop for quite some time. The company’s most recent accessory, the Magic Trackpad, is just another indication that the company is slowly but surely aiming to bring touch to the desktop.

What do you think of the patent documents? Would you be interested in a dual-function iMac or MacBook?

What follows are five of the hottest social media trends right now. Each are influencing our social, online and mobile behaviors in significant ways.

Entertainment checkin services are changing the way we watch television. Mobile loyalty applications are helping us connect the dots between our real-world shopping behaviors and digital rewards. A new breed of Q&A services are changing the way we search. Barcode scanning applications are making products social, and deal-of-the-day sites are giving us ways to save by recruiting our friends to the party.

1. Social Scanning

Smartphone owners have the world at their fingertips. As grandiose as that may sound, advances in mobile barcode scanning technology have given rise to applications that allow for comparison shopping, QR code place checkins and ultimately a social experience around product barcodes.

What this means is that at any given moment, any smartphone owner can pull out their device, fire up a barcode scanning application, scan a code and complete activities or gain access to a wealth of immediately relevant information. Really, what we’re seeing is the convergence of social media and barcode scanning to create “social scanning.”

The consumer’s scanning behavior is so significant that location-sharing checkin services such as SCVNGRare giving away QR code decals to retailers free of charge. Even Google is sending their own QR code decals out to small businesses with popular Place Pages. What makes the scan so significant? It is a tangible connection between the physical and digital world. For Google, SCVNGR, and the businesses they serve, it’s about access to measurable offline behavior.

These scans aren’t inherently social in nature, but because they can double as verifiable place checkins, they can also possess the social properties of a checkin: location-sharing with friends on the same service or via social network distribution.

Services such as Stickybits and Bakodo are taking the social scanning experience beyond the checkin and creating product-driven communities around brands and items via barcodes.

Stickybits lets users add video, text, photos and audio to the barcodes they scan in the physical world viaiPhone and Andriod apps. It’s a clever way to use barcodes to help people tag, share and connect around items. It has also recently become more brand-friendly. “Official bits” are barcodes that brands can claim in order to highlight their own content. New social features allow for user response in the form of threaded conversations, and voting to ensure that the best content attached to the code rises to the top.

Bakodo’s iPhone app began as a barcode scanner primarily for comparison shopping, but it’s evolving to add social scanning functions as well. App users can scan barcodes of all varieties to review items and check out recommendations from friends. The barcode intelligence search engine combines a wealth of product-related data and socializes the process for a comprehensive product-driven experience.

As scanning becomes a more socially acceptable practice, the barcode scan will only become more social in nature. Expect future QR code marketing efforts to tap into the social opportunities, and for brands to explore ways to engage with consumers at the scan touch point.

2. Q&A and Intelligent Information Discovery

Web-based Q&A services have been around for years. Now the previously sleepy space is seeing renewed interest from some of the Internet’s biggest names. This second iteration of Q&A services will likely forever redefine the way we find information, because it re-imagines “search” as intelligent information discovery.

The most buzzy of the bunch right now is Quora, an intuitive and relatively straightforward Q&A site whose co-founder, Adam D’Angelo, is most known for his past role as Facebook’s CTO. Quora was founded in June 2009, released into private beta in January 2010, and immediately became a hit Q&A site with the technorati crowd. In fact, web celebrities have been known to use the site to answer questions about themselves.

There are few Q&A services that have received the same type of attention as Quora, but the just-launchedFacebook Questions project — which mirrors Quora in purpose and function — was released before Quora ever achieved mainstream recognition. Now the two products are essentially going head-to-head, competing for the same audience.

Facebook has the clear edge when it comes to its built-in user base, but we’ve repeatedly seen bigger companies fail at side projects — just look at Google Wave — simply because smaller startups can innovate faster and have the benefit of progressively scaling over time. Quora’s opportunity lies in Facebook’s somewhat bungled launch of Questions, and its smart exposure through search results.

Another notable Q&A site that contributes to the intelligent information discovery trend is Google’s Aardvark

Aardvark approaches the space with a model that helps users surface answers through friends of friends. It’s an algorithmic social system that should help Google improve its search algorithms. In fact, Google should be able to use the technology to provide socially-relevant answers in search queries.

Google does have a reputation for letting purchased startups wilt after their pre-acquisition bloom, but given how closely aligned Aardvark is with Google’s core search product, that likely won’t be the case here.

There’s also the freshly enhanced Ask.com, which is seeking to join the “people plus search results” party with its new beta Q&A offering.

Most of the key players in the space believe in the power of intelligent information discovery and define it as the intersection of people and their social circles, with scientific methodologies for surfacing the best possible answers in the shortest amount of time.

Apple-owned artificial intelligence app Siri, however, eliminates the social and instead focuses on the science of finding the right answer.

Right now the overlap between services such as Aardvark and Siri is minimal, primarily because Siri focuses on solving immediate problems of convenience — finding food, calling a taxi or making a reservation — and not on long-term, more conceptual problems. Still, Siri is unquestionably a mobile search engine keen on intelligent information discovery, which means the technologies could become more competitive in the months ahead.

Another startup to watch for in this space is Swingly. The private beta service describes itself as a “Web-scale answer engine designed to find exact answers to factual questions.” Humans are largely eliminated in Swingly’s machine-driven Q&A formula, so it too challenges the notion that social integration enhances the Q&A experience.

3. Group Buying

Group buying is the deal-a-day group coupon trend made popular by Chicago-based startup Groupon. It’s also a slight variation on flash sale sites such as Woot, an Amazon property, which originated in the early 2000s.

Groupon is the brain-child of CEO Andrew Mason, who came up with the group buying idea after founding the earlier group-focused site The Point in 2007. The Point is a campaign platform designed to support group action around causes. In 2008, nearly a year after launch, the platform was repurposed to bring Groupon’s deal-of-the-day vision to life in Chicago.

Today, Groupon deals are available in cities across the world, thanks in part to the acquisition of international clone Citydeal. The company has also managed to come by a $1 billion valuation, partner with Twitter to power @EarlyBird deals, find alternative distribution via newspapers, and start personalizing deals for subscribers in select cities. Just yesterday, Groupon introduced its first nationwide deal — a 50% discount at the Gap — to much fanfare, attracting roughly 10 Groupon purchases every 10 seconds.

Over the years, Groupon’s successful model has been copied with ease. LivingSocial, 8coupons and a host of other clones have found their own way on the web. Recently, Yelp, Zagat and OpenTable have veered away from their core product strategy to bring group buying to their respective site audiences.

The clones and copycats keep on coming, but what’s also interesting is that a host of group buying enterprise-targeted software-as-a-service products are also cropping up. Each hopes to attract brand clients interested in offering their own Groupon-style deals. Wildfire has a Facebook-friendly do-it-yourself Group Deals product, Megachip Technologies just launched their own daily deal coupon software, and daily-deal site Adility launched a Groupon-like platform for small business earlier this summer.

All signs indicate that the group buying trend will only increase in popularity over time. Local businesses are finding that they can successfully attract new and repeat business by introducing customers to their services with a deeply-discounted group coupon. In fact, Groupon asserts that 97% of merchants featured on the site want to be featured again, which further demonstrates just how much demand they are dealing with.

In the future, look for more brands to create their own Groupon-style deals and for Groupon and its larger competitors to snatch up smaller clones in order to expand and enhance their offerings. Also watch for checkin and location-based services to intersect with group buying to create services similar to GroupTabs. The notion of having patrons check-in in masses to unlock deals is extremely business-friendly.

4. Mobile Meets Loyalty

As consumers purchase more and more smartphones and phone technology heads in the direction of the “super,” it’s only a matter of time before old-fashioned loyalty, rewards and club card programs head in the mobile direction. Two applications — Key Ring and CardStar give us a preview of what’s to come.

Both applications are designed to eliminate plastic loyalty card buildup with a single digital repository. The apps leverage barcode scanning technology so users can save gym cards, grocery store cards, drug store cards and the like, right to their phone.

This trend is just beginning to take shape as smartphones become more commonplace, scanners become more sophisticated and retailers become digitally savvy. In the future, we can expect integration with merchant loyalty programs, as well as integration with checkin services like Foursquare. The latter also demonstrates the inevitable convergence of social media with traditional loyalty programs, which we’re already seeing from Tasti-d-Lite’s innovative approach to automatic, POS-integrated social media rewards system.

Shopkick’s retailer-friendly automatic checkin service is currently being tested by Best Buy, Macy’s, Sports Authority and Simon Property Group. This early interest in Shopkick points to retailer interest in verifiable, checkin-driven rewards. There’s also private beta mobile app Pushpins, which seeks to leverage QR codes to further enmesh the in-store shopping experience with digital retailer rewards, the likes of which resemble the sophistication of SCVNGR’s recently released rewards program.

5. Checking-In to Entertainment

What are you watching on television right now? Whether it’s the latest episode of Mad Men or the next installment of a reality dating show, chances are that you’re sharing the entertainment experience either through face-to-face interaction with friends and family, or by posting outrageous and shocking moments to your favorite social media channels.

Consuming most entertainment media is an inherently social experience. A crop of services have popped up in recent months to refine that social experience through entertainment checkins — the act of checking into the television show or movie that you’re watching right now.

There are a few other services in the same mix that are certainly worth watching. CBS recently released their entertainment checkin service, TV.com Relay. It’s a browser-based mobile app for most smartphones that allows users to checkin to live television shows and follows the same TV guide-style format that Philo employs.

The CBS offering is nice to look at, and offers content-driven badges like the other guys. It also excels in the real-time comment department. In talking with the Senior Vice President and General Manager of CBS Interactive’s Entertainment and Lifestyle Division, Anthony Soohoo, it became clear that the vision behind TV.com Relay extends far beyond entertainment checkins. Soohoo also iterated that the application, which is just a few weeks old, already has 100,000 users thanks to TV.com’s built-in audience.

Tunerfish is another mobile and web television checkin service. It’s backed by Comcast and boasts partnerships with networks including HBO, Showtime and NBC. App users answer the question, “What are you watching?” by typing in the name of a show or movie and clicking the “I’m watching” button. The service also provides behavioral incentives in the form of awards, and has been actively working to bring network-sponsored,show-themed awards into the mix.

There’s also Clicker Social, a relatively new addition from Clicker that turns the television search engine and web TV guide into an entertainment checkin service as well.

The re-purposed entertainment version of the checkin is a smart way to link entertainment consumers with content they love, enhance the social experiences around television, and potentially inspire new audiences to tune into trending or friend-approved television shows. The enormous amount of competition in such a brand new space means that things are just starting to get interesting.

All of the services need to evolve to attach real value to the checkin. They each recognize that awards, badges and stickers are easy ways to encourage new user participation, but these existing game mechanics merely scratch the surface in terms of user engagement. In the coming months, look for constant iteration on this front. For example, we can expect Miso to introduce even more show-specific content exclusives via its show fan clubs and for GetGlue to experiment with offering discounts and coupons that users can redeem for their Glue points.

Writing a Facebook note can be a great way to start a discussion with friends about life’s big decisions or moments. What’s not always so great is creating a note or going back to one you already started.

Want to make something bold? You need to know the HTML tag for that. Want to work on an earlier draft? You have to navigate a bunch of links to get to your draft.

We’re changing all of that so it’s quicker and easier to create and find your notes and the notes from the people around you. We’ve rolled out a new layout and features for Facebook Notes. Now you can:

Format notes more easily with a familiar text editor. Stop looking up HTML for common formatting like bold, italics, bulleted and numbered lists, or indented quotes. Instead just click the formatting icons as you write a note.

Tag that special non-profit you believe in or that musician you’re raving about in a note. We’ve added tagging of Facebook Pages—such as celebrities, interests and activities. As with tags of friends, tags of Pages will appear in a box on the note’s page. When viewing Notes from a Facebook Page, you can browse notes in which that Page has been tagged by one of your friends or by people who shared their note with “everyone.”

Find more relevant notes through a cleaner layout. A common left-hand menu includes links to your note, notes about yourself, your drafts and easy ways to find notes about friends and Pages.

Twitter is great for sharing interesting things you find on the web. In fact, close to a quarter of all Tweets include a link in them. Despite the high volume of sharing, there is plenty of room to make it easier. Copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs just to share a link in a Tweet is too much work.

Today we’re launching the Tweet Button to make sharing simple. It lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear — pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.

After you post to Twitter, you may see suggestions for accounts to follow. These accounts are suggested by the web site you visited and may include, for example, the news outlet and reporter of the article you shared.

Check out our video, and try out the button at the bottom of this post!

The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too. Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites. It only takes a few lines of code. The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their Twitter following.

You may have seen similar buttons on blogs, news sites and other places that let you share content on Twitter. These have been created by third parties. Most notably, a company called TweetMeme created a popular “retweet button” for publishers. They’ve already made it easier to share links on Twitter and have helped a tremendous number of publishers get their content into Twitter. We’re pleased to be working closely with the good folks at TweetMeme and, from here on out, they will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button. Check out TweetMeme’s blog to learn more about what they’re up to next.

Starting today, the following sites will use the Tweet Button. All of them integrated this in less than one week.